This Saturday 22nd October, The Sharp Darts are supporting Canadian chart-toppers The Trews at HMV Institute (Library).

Not only are we supporting a great band in The Trews, but we'll be playing a 45 minute set, so this one is well worth coming down to. On top of that, this will be our last full band Birmingham gig for a little while, as we take a break during November (we will be doing the odd acoustic performance).

It's our biggest support slot to date, so we're really hoping you can come down to support us so we can put on a good show and bag ourselves another one in the future.

Tickets are available from us at £7 (£1 off if you came to London, £1 off if you post a picture of FB wearing your The Sharp Darts t-shirt). So if you haven't already, have a word with one of us and we'll get you a ticket.

As I'm sure you're aware, we are going to be playing main stage O2 Academy Birmingham this Sunday 28th August for the regional final of Surface Festival. We can't wait! We've been running a series on our competitors for the event.

The Sharp Darts are through to the regional showcase of Surface Festival 2011 at O2 Academy Birmingham! In this post I want to talk a little about how this round works, as it's a little different to the previous rounds.

In the first two rounds of the competition, the scoring was reasonably complicated, being based on text votes (1 rating), audience votes (5 ratings), musician votes (20 ratings) and industry votes (30 ratings). In the semi-final this changed slightly with the introduction of a judge.

In the semi-final, text and audience votes were added together and the top four bands were presented to a judge who voted through two acts of their choosing, independent of how may ratings they got. In the regional showcase, judges will play an even bigger role in selecting which bands continue to the International Final at IndigO2 in London.